LAHAINA — As we prepare to celebrate Christmas and move into the New Year, we are reminded of the grassroots community project Hungry Homeless Heroes Hawaii (HHHH) that began in Lahaina and is now island-wide.

While living on the West Side, co-founder Brad Kukral, in the midst of the pandemic, witnessed a homeless man get into trouble while trying to obtain food from a local grocery store.

“This incident was the impetus of the project,” he explained. “The man was hungry and just wanted to eat, and was begging for help. So, the next day, my friend Steven Calkins and I decided to cook and distribute meals. The operation increased literally overnight from 15 meals on the first night of our new program to 100 meals within a week. The operation grew overnight, literally!”

HHHH uses quality excess food to fill the stomachs and hearts of Maui’s hungry rather than the landfills. Kukral and Calkins set up a food redistribution organization that receives food from community members and farms with surplus, besides growing their own food at Napili Community Garden on the West Side and Anuhea Chapel in Pukalani.

Additionally, they have put together an all-volunteer team who garden, prepare nourishing meals and personally deliver them to the unsheltered on the West Side and throughout Maui.

Kukral continued, “The pandemic impacted the unsheltered community in its own unique way in terms of limited restroom facilities, the inability to comply with stay-at-home orders and difficulties obtaining food. Through a Facebook network on Maui, we were able to collect donations and supplies. As the program grew, so did the area of response. Volunteers and donations rolled in from a variety of area businesses, organizations and private citizens. During the pandemic, we delivered an estimated 2,900 meals to Lahaina, Paia, Kahului, Wailuku and Kihei over the course of 20 days.

Currently, the program can produce as many as 250 to 300 meals a day. However, a main ingredient that the homeless need is the feeling of not being abandoned. Kindness is as appreciated as food.

“HHHH works with compassion to bring hope to the hopeless,” Calkins said. “Giving comfort and joy, as well as food, to the unsheltered is extremely important to us. Loving kindness gives a much-needed impetus to have the courage to succeed and get back into the world, relearning job and life skills. Hope is the string that pulls faith and love. So, we try to serve hope and kindness along with the meal.”

HHHH often coordinates with Maui Rescue Mission (MRM), which offers showers and access to washers and dryers for clothes. MRM can often be found parked at Lahaina Baptist Church. The church has also been a major source of food and comfort for the unemployed, hungry and unsheltered in the West Side community.

Also, HHHH is grateful to Napili Community Garden for allowing them to grow produce for the project on a small plot of land, and to Napili Farmers Market for giving food donations for meals.

“Our future vision would be to take another step toward a permanent solution by galvanizing the community around this most dire issue facing the unsheltered,” Calkins explained. “Ideally, we would like to find a self-sustaining property where families could come on a work-trade basis. In the meantime, HHHH’s purpose is to feed the hungry with hope, one meal at a time. The staff have been mindful of sustainability and work to create an environment that recognizes, validates and enhances the dignity of everyone experiencing homelessness. We are aware that HHHH is a community effort to feed Maui and bring hope and joy throughout the holiday season and beyond. Mahalo to all those volunteers in the community who bring comfort, kindness, and food to those in need.”

Steve Calkins and Brad Kukral are the co-founders of Hungry Homeless Heroes Hawaii, a new nonprofit on Maui.

Just after the stay-at-home order began islandwide, the two were walking down Front Street in Lahaina.

“It was a ghost town,” said Calkins. Both felt there was a visible yet indiscernible need for those without shelter or food.

The following day, Kukral visited a supermarket. He witnessed a man running from the store with a shopping cart filled with his belongings. A store employee ran behind him, eventually catching up and grabbing the two bags of beef jerky the man had stolen from the store.

“It couldn’t have been more than $15,” said Kukral. The man with the cart then broke down, pleading and begging with the store worker, telling him he was hungry and hadn’t eaten in days.

“No one was really paying attention,” said Kukral.

He pulled into a parking spot nearby and continued to watch from a distance. A construction worker, who was also on the scene, stepped in and began yelling at the homeless man. He proceeded to take the man’s cart and empty it’s contents onto the street. People continued to walk by, no one doing anything. A few strangers muttered and audibly snickered passing by.

Kukral had seen enough. He proceeded into the store and bought the man a bento box. Giving it to him, he said, “I don’t really condone stealing. But I understand what you’re going through.”

He knew that he would have to do something about it. That night Calkins and Kukral began brainstorming.

“We decided we could cook some meals,” they said.

They posted the initiative to the Facebook group, Maui Helping Maui. The response was immediate. Donations began pouring in from the Maui community with offers of rice, pasta, beans — all kinds of food.

“If someone is going to donate something to us, we’re gonna use it,” said Kukral.

What humbly began as just a few meals, all prepared in Kukral’s one-room apartment, grew daily as it caught the attention of others who wanted to help. With the online network that Maui Helping Maui gave the growing team of volunteers, Kukral and Calkins connected with other community heroes like Aaron Fung, owner of Blue Moon Cafe in Kihei. Fung graciously donated his space and licensed kitchen, which gave a central location for Hungry Homeless Heroes to continue to prepare meals. His kitchen offered a perfect temporary solution. What started as a way to feed the hungry on the west side, grew rapidly with more drivers, more cooks and more helping heroes.

Declining to have their photo taken, Calkins’ said the real heroes are the people they feed every day. Right now, Hungry Homeless Heroes is serving between 350 and 450 people a night, according to Calkins.

Their clients are the most vulnerable. Based on the latest study released by the County of Maui, there are roughly 1,300 to 1,400 people living without shelter on the island. It would be safe to assume those numbers are actually considerably higher, and the vulnerable population has grown exponentially with the current economic climate.

Calkins and Kukral prove that individuals can really make a difference in the lives of many. Human kindness that can make the difference in someone’s life is sometimes served one meal at a time.

Hungry Homeless Heroes is accepting monetary gifts, food and man-hour donations.